awing-room and receive him there, remaining with her
husband in the dining-room till he should come. Twice while sitting
downstairs after the cloth was gone she ran upstairs with the avowed
purpose of going into the nursery, but in truth that she might see that
the room was comfortable, that it looked pretty, and that the chairs
were so arranged as to be convenient. The two eldest children were with
them in the parlor, and when she started on her second errand, Cissy
reminded her that baby would be asleep. Theodore, who understood the
little manoeuvre, smiled, but said nothing, and his wife, who in such
matters was resolute, went and made her further little changes in the
furniture. At last there came the knock at the door--the expected knock,
a knock which told something of the hesitating, unhappy mind of him who
had rapped, and Mrs. Burton started on her business. "Tell him just
simply why you are there alone," said her husband.

"Is it Harry Clavering?" Cissy asked, "and mayn't I go?"

"It is Harry Clavering," her father said, "and you may not go. Indeed,
it is time you went somewhere else."

It was Harry Clavering. He had not spent a pleasant day since he had
left Mr. Beilby's offices in the morning, and, now that he had come to
Onslow Crescent, he did not expect to spend a pleasant evening. When I
declare that as yet he had not come to any firm resolution, I fear that
he will be held as being too weak for the role of hero even in such
pages as these. Perhaps no terms have been so injurious to the
profession of the novelist as those two words, hero and heroine. In
spite of the latitude which is allowed to the writer in putting his own
interpretation upon these words, something heroic is still expected;
whereas, if he attempt to paint from nature, how little that is heroic
should he describe! How many young men, subjected to the temptations
which had befallen Harry Clavering--how many young men whom you,
delicate reader, number among your friends--would have come out from
them unscathed? A man, you say, delicate reader, a true man can love but
one woman--but one at a time. So you say, and are so convinced; but no
conviction was ever more false. When a true man has loved with all his
heart and all his soul--does he cease to love--does he cleanse his heart
of that passion when circumstances run against him, and he is forced to
turn elsewhere for his life's companion? Or is he untrue as a lover in
that he does not was